Entering professional practice requires that novices construct
identities that fit into that world; part of the role of professional
education is to help novices craft these professional identities. During
the transitional time represented by professional education, students
negotiate their images of themselves as professionals with the images
reflected to them by their programs. This process of negotiation can be
fraught with difficulty, especially when these images conflict
(Britzman, 1990; Cole & Knowles, 1993). As they adapt to new roles,
novices must also learn to negotiate their personal identity with the
professional role, even as they navigate among the different images of
professional identity offered by their programs and practitioners in the
field. In this article we draw on the work of Hazel Markus and others on
the development of possible selves to investigate the opportunities
novices have to encounter, try out, and evaluate possible selves in the
process of constructing professional identities. We use data from a
study of the preparation of teachers, clergy, and clinical psychologists to illustrate the relationship of possible selves and professional
identity, and the role that professional education might play in
supporting the development of professional identity.

Background

The literature on novice teachers' transitions into student
teaching and the first year describes this experience as plagued by
disillusionment, failure, loneliness, and insecurity (Britzman, 1990;
Cole & Knowles, 1993; Hargreaves & Jacka, 1995; Rust, 1994).
Left unresolved, such transitional issues can discourage new teachers
from remaining in the profession and may contribute to the low retention
rates of teachers in the first five years of teaching (c.f.
Darling-Hammond & Schlan, 1996; Ingersoll, 2001). However, these
challenges to early professional socialization are not unique to
teaching. Kaslow & Rice (1985), for example, describe clinical
psychology internships as a time of "professional adolescence"
marked by personal and professional stress and identity transition. A
central issue across professions is that novices are expected to act the
part before they fully grasp or identify with new roles, which has
important implications for professional acceptance and effectiveness
(Goffman, 1959; Ibarra, 1999).

Given how pervasive the challenges are, one would expect
professional education to play an integral part in helping novices to
transition into their new roles. However, literature on teacher
socialization generally characterizes coursework as having relatively
little influence over socialization at best (Zeichner & Gore, 1990),
and as counterproductive at worst (Hargreaves & Jacka, 1995).
Fieldwork is often considered the most influential component of
professional socialization in teacher education. Yet fieldwork tends to
perpetuate the status quo within the placement sites (Britzman, 1990),
and often runs counter to the goals that professional education programs
may have, heightening the dissonance experienced by novices (Wideen et.
al., 1998; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985).

Conceptual Framework

Building on the work of Hazel Markus and colleagues (Cross &
Markus, 1991; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Markus, Mullaly, &
Kitayama, 1997), we explore the role of possible selves in the crafting
of professional identity. As individuals engage with the practices,
people, and role expectations that compose a given culture, they develop
what Markus & Nurius (1986) deem "possible selves."
Possible selves are "the ideal selves that we would very much like
to become. They are also the selves we could become, and the selves we
are afraid of becoming" (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 954). Within
this framework, possible selves serve as incentives for change and as
touchstones for evaluating current selves.

Developing this line of research further, Ibarra (1999) introduced
"provisional selves" to elaborate how specific possible selves
may be appropriated and rejected as people transition into more senior
roles within a business culture. She found that novices adapt to new
roles through an iterative process of observation, experimentation, and
evaluation. As people observe others in the professional role, they
generate a repertoire of potential identities; they experiment with
provisional selves by putting them to practical tests; they then
evaluate the effectiveness of their enactments based on their own and
others' perceptions.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While Ibarra's work concerns role transitions among in-service
professionals in business, her model may also apply to pre-service
professional education since it too involves role transitions--from
being a student to becoming a professional. Viewed through Ibarra's
framework, professional education is a place to begin the iterative
cycle of adaptation by providing opportunities to observe, experiment
with, and evaluate provisional selves as an explicit part of crafting a
new professional identity.

Because of their relationship to one another, we use the terms
possible selves, provisional selves, and professional identity somewhat
interchangeably. In Markus & Nurius's (1986) original framing,
possible selves refer to future self-concepts. Only some of these
self-concepts are actually tried out. For our purposes, we define
provisional selves as those possible selves that are actually tried out
in professional education. In line with Ibarra's findings, we argue
that, through experimentation with provisional selves in professional
education, novices determine which possible and provisional selves are
helpful in adapting to new roles. Initially these provisional selves are
temporary solutions for meeting the expectations that come with new
roles; over time, some become integrated into professional identity. In
this definition, we borrow from Ibarra, who describes professional
identity as the "relatively stable and enduring constellation of
attributes, beliefs, values, motives, and experiences in terms of which
people define themselves in a professional role" (pp. 764-765).

We also emphasize the centrality of "practices" to
professional identity. As Miller and Goodnow contend, "The concept
of practice recognizes that the acquisition of knowledge or skill is
part of the construction of an identity or a person" (1995, p. 9).
Novices do not take up all strategies that they encounter. Some ways of
doing in classrooms can represent ways of being that run counter to who
they want to become as professionals. As such, novices may define their
possible selves in terms of the practices in which they want to engage.
In this sense, the choice of which practices to appropriate and which to
reject helps define professional identity.

Many people, including some faculty and students we interviewed,
assume that some aspects of professional identity cannot be developed,
but rather inhere in the personalities of individuals, leading to claims
that teachers, clergy, or therapists 'are born, not made.'
While we acknowledge that personal and professional identities are
interwoven, we suggest that professional education--by structuring
opportunities to encounter, experiment with, and evaluate possible
selves--can support novices in crafting and sustaining professional
identities.

Study Design and Methods

The data in this article are drawn from a larger study of the
teaching of practice in the preparation of clergy, teachers, and
clinical psychologists (c.f. Grossman, Compton, Igra, Ronfeldt, Shahan,
& Williamson, 2009). Our data include case studies of two teacher
education programs, three seminaries, and three clinical psychology
programs. We sampled programs that had strong reputations for the
quality of their professional preparation programs. All eight programs
were at the graduate level; at the teacher education institutions, we
observed both elementary and secondary teacher preparation programs. We
visited each program at least twice, observing in classes, interviewing
students, faculty and administrators, and running focus groups. Across
visits, we spoke with 120 instructors, 269 students, and 16
administrators. Because our focus was on the teaching of practice, we
oversampled what are generally called "methods" or more
practical coursework, including subject-matter methods classes in
teacher education, homiletics in the clergy, and clinical interviewing
and assessment classes in clinical psychology. Again, we sampled course
instructors that had strong reputation as teachers, according to both
students and other faculty members. We also followed students into their
field experiences, whenever possible. More recently, we focused in on
the experiences of four clinical psychology and four teacher education
students, conducting ongoing observations and interviews throughout
their first year of preparation, probing specifically the issue of
professional identity (Ronfeldt, 2006).

This analysis focuses primarily on data from student focus groups
and interviews with students, but also draws on faculty interviews and
field observations of coursework and fieldwork. Across the multiple
focus groups and interviews included in this analysis, we spoke with 29
students in clinical psychology, 42 students in teacher education, and
15 students in the clergy. In focus groups, we asked students explicitly
about the kind of professional they hoped to become and about the kind
of professional they believed their programs wanted to prepare. We also
asked them about some of the most significant influences on their
development as a professional. With regard to the eight novices that we
focused on more recently, each quarter we asked them to specifically
discuss the kind of professional they hoped to become and feared
becoming. At each site, we tried to talk with students who were both at
the beginning and towards the end of their preparation program. We
analyzed focus groups and interviews for insights into the kinds of
possible and provisional selves that students were constructing in
professional education, and how these might be linked to experiences
within programs. We categorized such comments according to whether they
represented desired or feared possible selves. We also examined the data
for evidence of the sources of these possible selves.

We also analyzed fieldnotes of our observations of courses and
fieldwork. Our analyses of these data focused on explicit opportunities
to experiment with provisional selves. In our analyses of coursework, we
focused primarily on what we are calling "approximations of
practice" (Grossman et. al., 2009) in which novices enacted facets
of practice. These included simulations of practice, role plays, etc.
Finally, we examined what novices said about their opportunities to
experiment with provisional selves during field experiences.

We begin our discussion of findings by exploring the repertoire of
possible selves that novices developed and the dimensions of
professional preparation that may have contributed to this repertoire.
We then examine opportunities for novices to try on and evaluate
provisional selves, and what these opportunities may mean for the
development of professional identity.

A Repertoire of Possible Selves

Students enter professional education with a tentative set of
possible selves from which to draw. As work on the "apprenticeship of observation" in teaching (Lortie, 1975) suggests, prospective
teachers enter teacher education with multiple, albeit partial, images
of teachers. The same is true for prospective clergy, who generally have
had prior experience with clergy members throughout their lives. Those
who plan to become therapists may also use their experiences in therapy
to imagine the kind of therapist they want to become. These images
provide an initial touchstone for the development of professional
identity. Many of the participants in our study explicitly identified
prior teachers, clergy, or therapists who inspired them to enter the
profession in the first place.

Once they enter professional education, however, novices encounter
a much wider range of possible selves through both coursework and field
experiences. Those in our study paid careful attention to the models of
professional identity they encountered in their programs, including
their instructors, supervisors, and mentors in the field. As one
rabbinical student commented about the plethora of possible models:

I think the most powerful thing I've learned is that there are so
many possible ways to be a rabbi, and to be a good rabbi. And I
think that comes from a whole number of different things we've been
exposed to at school. One is just the rabbis that we get exposed to
in terms of the instructors that we do get exposed to.... Our field
work of various kinds all really give us that kind of exposure that
you can see models in congregations of different rabbis that are
successful in very different sizes, different population, different
economic structures... (Focus Group, KRS, 2/2004)

Students encountered possible selves--both feared and desired--when
observing and interacting with different people and contexts during
their professional education. They mentioned university instructors,
practitioners in clinical placements, and even community leaders as
presenting both desired and feared possibilities. Students also referred
to coursework activities, presentations, discussions, readings, and
videos as presenting images of possible selves. When asked about people
that represent the kind of professional they hope to become, students
often identified course instructors and advisors as positive models. In
describing what they admired about their instructors, students primarily
attended to disposition, manner, and values. They highlighted their
instructors' compassion, charisma, integrity, nurturing, humor,
openness, commanding presence, commitment, and care. All of these might
be seen as aspects of personal identity, as much as professional
identity, and in fact, novices saw their instructors as examples of how
personal identity can be at the core of professional identity:

I think one of the strongest lessons that I've learned ... is that
we are the text that we teach, and that the first thing that--and
probably the primary thing--that people will take away from their
interactions with us is us, and how we interact with them. And the
integrity, the consistency, the values that we portray and that we
live are the most potent lesson that we have. (Focus Group, KRS,
2/2004)

While students articulated aspects of manner, disposition, and
values as foundational to the professional identities of the instructors
they admired, they focused less on how these qualities were used as
instruments for professional practice. They expressed admiration for an
instructor's charisma, for example, without identifying how it was
used to captivate and inspire learning in others. In concentrating so
intently on personal manner, students often conflated professional
identity and personality. Aspects of manner, for example, are an
important part of professional identity, as a tool for professional
practice, but are not sufficient. Being charismatic, for instance, can
help motivate learners, but charisma alone will not ensure that students
learn.

That students failed to make the connection between these personal
qualities and professional practice may reflect the fact that they
generally had few opportunities to observe faculty in the role of
practitioner. For example, Quise, a clinical psychology student, viewed
her advisor and instructor, Dr. Winetraub, as representing the kind of
clinical psychologist she hopes to become. She explained, "I think
part of it is that she is a really good balance between being confident
in her ability to work, in her competence as a therapist, but also she
is very self-disclosing about her vulnerabilities and her perceived
weaknesses" (Interview, CPP, 5/2007). When asked if she had
observed Dr. Winetraub during a therapy session, Quise admitted she had
not, adding, "She's good about [balancing confidence and
vulnerability] with the class. And I see her as being good about that in
supervision too. The problem with therapy is that you don't get to
see a lot of real therapy done. It is weird trying to learn a skill and
not ever really watching experienced people doing it" (Interview,
CPP, 5/2007).

When novices do not actually see instructors in practitioner roles,
the possible selves they encounter are always partial. Thus, clinical
psychology students who claimed their instructors were "fabulous
psychologists" were often making an inference based on what they
imagined rather than what they observed. Even in teacher education,
where students observed course instructors in a teaching role, it was
quite a different role than K-12 public school teaching. What
professional education students did not necessarily encounter in their
university instructors, then, were images of professional identity at
work in the actual roles they will enter.

However, when students across professions did have opportunities to
observe their instructors enact practitioner roles, they described such
experiences as exceptionally useful. At Grace Seminary, for example,
students had the opportunity to plan daily worship services for the
seminary with experienced instructors/ministers. This experience gave
students an opportunity to observe their instructors enact the roles and
responsibilities of ministers while working in partnership with them.
One of the students commented about these instructors:

For me, both of [the instructors] are real, in what they teach; and
what they teach is exactly who they are in every context that
they're in. And so they're modeling everything that they teach, and
that's what, as a pastor and a person that's in ministry, that's
what you're going to be asked to do also. (Focus Group, Grace
Seminary, 3/2004)

In this instance, students were able to see their instructors both
as "pastors" and as "a person that's in
ministry;" because they were able to work alongside their
instructors, the relationship between personal and professional identity
was more transparent.

In teacher education, our fieldnotes and interviews included many
examples of instructors demonstrating model lessons during university
coursework, generally with teacher education students enacting the role
of K-12 pupils. An important advantage to these model lessons was that
they allowed instructors to model principles and practices advocated by
the program, including ones rarely encountered in fieldwork.
Furthermore, students appreciated that instructors could pause model
lessons to explicate their choices, in their role as teacher, and to
answer questions along the way. These opportunities to observe
instructors in the practitioner role had great potential for exposing
novices to desired possible selves, as long as novices perceived the
experiences as authentic representations of practice. However, students
sometimes complained that these models felt staged or inauthentic. Some
teacher education students, for example, suspected that demonstrated
practices that were possible with motivated graduate students would not
work in their K-12 classrooms. Hence, many students turned to fieldwork
opportunities to observe practitioners at work with 'real'
clients, pupils, and congregants.

Like we had summer field placements, and I was in a group with a
teacher, a leader, who the kids loved and trusted so much. And I was
like, 'Okay, I know that she's what I want to do [sic].' I'm going
to watch this person ... and see what she does and how she speaks to
them, and I am going to do that. I mean, not exactly the same way,
but I'm going to use what she does. And so I would sit and I would
listen to her talk to the students, and what she said, and how she
addressed them. (Focus Group, Riverdale, 8/2006)

Because Meg wanted to become a teacher that establishes trusting
and caring relationships with her own students, she was drawn to and
studied someone who embodied this type of teacher. For Meg, developing
one's own professional identity was partly a process of observing
others who represented desired selves while they were engaged in
professional work. In this way, Meg construed a caring possible self not
just in terms of disposition but in terms of how such a self is
expressed through interaction and communication in classroom practice.

In reflecting on their observations of cooperating teachers, novice
teachers recounted some desired possible selves. More often, however,
they described encounters with feared possible selves. They spoke of
teachers who seemed uncaring, burnt out, mean, rigid, robotic,
disrespectful, and authoritarian. Often their displeasure with
cooperating teachers existed, at least in part, because of the disparity between their program's vision for the kind of teacher they should
become and what they observed in the field. Even amidst the more
positive examples they encountered, novices rarely described cooperating
teachers who exemplified the kinds of practices and ways of being
promoted in their coursework. As Melanie described, "[Our program]
wants us to have democratic classrooms and democratic kids. In watching
the teacher that I'm with every day ... she reads kids' grades
out loud, and she calls [on] the smart kids, and she says, 'Oh, who
do we think has the answer? We know Ellie has the answer.' And
I'm cringing" (Focus Group, Riverdale, 8/2006).

Markus and Nurius (1986) argue that identifying feared possible
selves is helpful; by working to avoid them, people are able to move
closer to their hoped-for selves. Assembling a wide repertoire of
possible selves can then support the development of professional
identity. In fact, some research has demonstrated that it can be
developmentally helpful to have counter-veiling feared selves to offset
expected selves in a particular domain (Cross & Markus, 1991;
Oyserman & Markus, 1990). In this spirit, one novice rabbi described
how he used both feared and hoped for selves that he encountered in
constructing his own professional identity:

I'm kind of beginning to model my rabbinate ... on what I've
seen--the good, but also the bad ... I told [my mentor] that I
wanted to become a rabbi based on the rabbi I didn't like, from one
congregation ... Part of it is you do see what's out there, and you
analyze what's out there and you really take what you want. And
that's the good of saying, 'This is what I don't want to be and this
is what I do want to be.' (Focus Group, KRS, 2/2004)

While a wide and balanced repertoire of possible selves may be
desirable, novice teachers described a somewhat lopsided repertoire.
Encounters with feared selves during fieldwork pervaded the data from
teacher education, in contrast to our other two professions. Moreover,
student teachers reported relatively few encounters with desired selves
in the field, especially ones that reflected the images promoted by
their coursework. This imbalance represents an on-going challenge for
teacher education that is focused on preparing teachers as change
agents.

As novices encountered a range of practitioners, they began to
catalogue both desired and feared selves to piece together a makeshift
image of the kind of professional they hoped to become. But untested
images of what may be possible were not enough to prepare novices for
new roles, even when these images included specific strategies and ways
of interacting with others. It is one thing to have a clear and
elaborated vision of a possible self and quite another to actually enact
that vision. The novices we interviewed described opportunities to
actually try out and evaluate provisional selves as critical to their
development of professional identity.

Provisional Selves: Experimentation and Evaluation

And I think that one of the best ways to learn how to gain the trust
[of students] is to watch other people do it, and then do it
yourself and not just observe but actually then put it into
practice. (Meg, Focus Group, Riverdale, 8/2006)

As Meg explained, novices needed more than observations to develop
a sense of professional identity, they needed opportunities to enact the
role of professional, to "actually put it into practice." This
was consistent with Ibarra's description of early professional
identity as "provisional constructions that must be revised with
experience" (p. 783). These provisional selves allowed novices to
function--often clumsily--in new roles, as they tested out their
emerging conceptions of the professional they hoped to become.

Across the professions we observed, university coursework provided
relatively limited opportunities to experiment with new roles and to try
on versions of professional identity. Ironically, in professions that
are characterized by ongoing interaction with other people,
opportunities to experiment with and receive feedback on the more
interactive aspects of practice were especially rare. When students did
have coursework opportunities to try on the role of the professional,
these were generally in the areas of planning or assessment, such as
planning a sermon in seminaries, doing a sample diagnostic assessment in
clinical psychology, or planning lessons and assessing examples of
student work in teacher education. While these activities did require
students to enact parts of professional role, they provided limited
chances for novices to react to the uncertainties inherent in
interactive practice.

In teacher education we observed a number of model lessons that
included more interactive dimensions of teaching, but the instructors
generally taught the lesson, while novices enacted the role of K-12
pupils (c.f. Williamson, 2006). While some novices found value in being
in the pupil role, they rarely had opportunities during coursework to
experiment with enacting the teacher role themselves. And where they did
have such opportunities, there was experimentation but little
evaluation. In one literacy methods class, for example, students used
read-aloud strategies to teach their peers who served as pupils. In
these lessons, novices had a chance to try out provisional selves;
however, they received minimal feedback from their peers. Without
meaningful feedback, novices could not be sure that the provisional
selves they intended to enact were actually conveyed to others. This may
be especially important in relational practices where professional
success depends upon the response of clients, congregants, or students
to the professional. In some cases, instructors did include assignments
for novice teachers to try out program-endorsed practices and principles
in their field settings. But instructors generally did not get to
observe students directly as they performed so their evaluations were
constrained by what novices later chose and failed to represent.

Compared with teaching, we observed more coursework opportunities
for novices to experiment with--and receive feedback on--provisional
selves during interactive practice in clinical psychology and the
clergy. In the worship planning seminar at Grace Seminary, mentioned
above, students had ongoing opportunities to help plan and lead services
for the seminary community with an experienced team of
ministers/instructors. Students, faculty, and assorted guests served in
various roles--as preacher, liturgist, scripture reader, etc.--and each
chaplain's assistant took primary responsibility for the planning
and scheduling of one week of services at a time. The worship team met
once a week to reflect upon the strengths and weaknesses of the most
recent services and to refine their plans for upcoming services. This
"approximation of practice" (Grossman et al., 2009) provided
opportunities for students to enact the different components of the
chaplain's role in a setting that was quite authentic. Yet because
this was designed as a learning opportunity, students were also allowed
to experiment with ways of enacting the role that may not have been
possible in church settings. As one student commented,

I think for me it has been a really good experience to be creative
with worship and to have the flexibility. I know whenever I went
back to my home church over Christmas break, I wanted to do all
these new and inventive things that I'm able to do here, and yet the
reality of 'this is what we always do, this is what we need to do,
we need to sing this type of stuff.' (Focus Group, Grace Seminary,
3/2004)

This student described the ability to try on a provisional self
that might be impossible in the context of his home church.

While they appreciated the approximation of practice as an
opportunity to experiment with provisional selves, students also
appreciated the opportunities for immediate feedback built into the
worship experience. One student used the opportunity to focus on writing
his own liturgy, explaining, "And the other thing is that because
it's in partnership with Paul and Richard and Marie, I may write
something, and there's maybe a phrase that's a little funky and I get feedback on that" (Focus Group, Grace Seminary, 3/2004).
As he realized, this kind of feedback on practice will be less frequent
as he enters solo practice. Being able to encounter, enact, and evaluate
provisional selves all within the same setting was a special opportunity
for developing professional identity. The same experts that introduced
specific desired selves were there also to observe and evaluate this
student's efforts to enact them along the way. Since they were
familiar with how an effective performance looks, they could provide
especially useful feedback.

Across our sites, clinical psychology incorporated the greatest
number of opportunities for students to experiment with and evaluate
provisional selves during interactive dimensions of practice. In one
clinical psychology course, students frequently engaged in role-plays
with peers--one student acting as therapist, the other as client. They
were required to videotape these "sessions" and then study the
videotapes, alone and together in class. While role plays provided
multiple opportunities to enact the role of therapist, they also
provided opportunities for self-evaluation and feedback from others. An
advantage to this pedagogy was that, as they studied the principles and
practices together, instructor and students were able to provide
informed and more consistent feedback on one another's enactments.

Many students focused on these video role-plays as important
experiences for trying on and revising a new professional self. For
example, watching video of role plays taught one first year student the
importance of matching a client's affect: "From watching [the
video], the biggest thing I probably learned is that I smile an awful
lot. And I'm smiling now. But I just didn't realize it and I
just realized how inappropriate that can be in certain times"
(Interview, CPP, 1/2006). Another student from this program commented
that she learned to "sit with silence in a therapy session"
from her experience doing video role plays: "I think I felt anxious
in the beginning and felt like I had to rush to kind of fill space or
fill a voice, or ask a question, when maybe it was okay to just kind of
relax and do another reflection statement or just sit with the
silence" (Focus Group, CPP, 6/2004). Dealing with this same
challenge, another student said she had to intentionally abandon aspects
of her prior professional identity in order to develop a new one. She
explained, "I'm coming out of 10 years of sales, so for me,
quiet is dead time, and my goal isn't to let you come up with your
ideas but to tell you what I want you to do ... And so that's
something I'm having to learn is the quiet and the letting them
talk" (Focus Group, CPP, 6/2004). When asked how she learned to do
this, she again identified the video role-plays as an opportunity to
experiment with a different professional self, one that is comfortable
with silence.

Role-plays also offered opportunities to experiment with a range of
provisional selves. In one role play exercise, the instructor asked
students to experiment with being a confrontational therapist, a
possible self that is often feared by new therapists. Before having
students try out this approach, she had them observe video examples of
more confrontational therapists in action, including one that
demonstrated the therapeutic value of being confrontational. Afterwards,
students tried on a more confrontational persona with one another. As a
result, students were pushed to experiment with and to develop
dimensions of professional identity that might otherwise be left
unexplored. As the instructor explained, this role play "gives
people who are nice a sanctioned reason to not be nice"
(Observational Fieldnotes, CPP, 10/2005).

The novice clinical psychologists we observed had many
opportunities to experiment with interactive dimensions of role in a
variety of role-plays during coursework. Most role-plays were structured
to incorporate evaluation, including self-evaluation of videotaped
sessions and feedback from peers. As a result, novices have had an
opportunity to try out and refine provisional selves in these
interactive roles even before they began to work with real clients.
However, as we explore next, clinical placements were the primary site
for experimentation and thus crucial in the development of professional
identity.

From the Classroom to the Field: Experimenting with Professional
Identity

Many students described their fieldwork as having the most
influence on professional identity development because of the extensive
opportunities to experiment with professional role, including numerous
opportunities to engage in interactive dimensions of practice. For
example, from early in the first year of her clinical psychology
program, Amanda anticipated that she might struggle with being
judgmental as a therapist. She commented, "If you have someone come
in and [she] says, 'I'm pregnant but can't stop
drinking,' I mean how do you sit there and [not] say, 'How the
hell did you become a mother?'" (Interview, CPP, 10/2006). In
one of her very first courses, Amanda acknowledged feeling somewhat
judgmental during a role-play when a peer in the "client" role
discussed using drugs. Even so, Amanda explained that it is important to
acknowledge that others have different morals and "therapy is not
where I should be standing on my soapbox" (Interview, CPP,
10/2006).

For Amanda, her practicum work with substance abuse patients was an
important setting for putting her feared self to a practical test:
"What I've learned the most regarding just working with that
type of population is just having like empathy and when they tell you
something really disturbing, kind of just like rolling with it and not
having this look of shock on your face when they tell you
something" (Interview, CPP, 4/2007). Her experimentation in role
gave Amanda practice with and confidence in being a non-judgmental and
empathic therapist.

Amanda's case demonstrates the power of successful
experimentation with provisional selves in developing professional
identity. However, there are many expectations and constraints within
clinical settings that make it difficult to experiment with a range of
provisional selves at all, let alone to do so successfully. Such
roadblocks in clinical settings seem especially problematic in the
preparation of teachers. During fieldwork in both clinical psychology
and clergy, novices generally felt comfortable experimenting with
provisional selves advocated by their programs. In teacher education,
however, students often struggled in their efforts to enact
program-endorsed provisional selves, particularly with regard to their
identities as social justice educators or change agents. One student
explained, "So it's very hard. I see a very large gap between
what we see as the role of the teacher in our [university] classes to
what the role of the teacher is in the actual classrooms of the high
schools here" (Focus Group, Riverdale, 9/2005). Another student
commented:

But most of the time in the classroom, I feel like everything that
I'm learning at [the university], it's a completely different world.
Like I'm in the classroom and I'm telling kids to 'sit down,' and
you know 'you can sharpen your pencil only in the morning.' And I
think, 'Am I teaching [for] understanding?' (Focus Group, Riverdale,
9/2005)

Students in both teacher education programs talked about the
difficulty of reconciling the identities they are being encouraged to
take on at the university, with the realities of the schools in which
they're placed. As one student said,

They're very progressive in the way that this program functions, so
I feel like when I go into my classroom, like into an urban public
school, I feel like sometimes that it's very disconnected from what
actually happens ... And you see how things actually are and that's
not to say that it's not great to learn more about educational
philosophies and feel better educated about what you're doing so
that you can speak intelligently about it ... But in terms of what
we're actually going to be doing, it's a nice framework from which
to look at it, but the student teaching is just so much more
important and so much more attached to reality, I think, than what
we do in class. (Focus Group, Riverdale, 9/2005)

Another student added, "We've been sent out on a mission
to go out and change the world with teaching, but ... the program is not
really teaching [me] to be that real teacher and actually dealing with
the issues at hand in these urban public schools" (Focus Group,
Riverdale, 9/2005). These students seemed to suggest that the possible
selves they develop in teacher education may be useful for viewing,
understanding, and critiquing, but not working in, actual classrooms.
Perhaps even more worrisome was their tendency to dichotomize the
possible selves imagined by the program from the image of the "real
teacher" who must function in urban classrooms.

But how do encounters with these contradictory possible selves in
the university and field influence the development of professional
identity? And how is this tension negotiated during student teaching? To
explore these questions more deeply, we describe the experiences of
Alfred and Johnny, two teacher education students from the same program.

Alfred, a first year teacher education student, articulated the
conflict he experienced between the professional identity as agent of
change, advocated by his program, and the realities of his school
placement. As he explained: "I mean, there's a lot of good
stuff that [our course instructors] are showing us but it seems to
conflict with what I'm seeing in the classroom. I don't know.
The classroom where I'm in right now, for instance, they're
using the [mandated] basal reading ... So it's pretty much just you
open a book and you just lead the lessons" (Interview, Oceanside,
1/2007). Although one of his possible selves was that of a social
justice educator who was willing to be critical of the status quo and to
work for social change, a large part of his experimentation during
student teaching involved "playing by the rules" especially in
terms of sticking to the district-mandated curricula and pacing plan:
"Honestly, like this time around, to me it's just to get
familiar with being in the classroom and being identified as a teacher.
You know, being here in the morning, following a scripted curriculum, so
I just want myself to be familiar with that" (Interview, Oceanside,
2/2007).

Alfred was sensitive to the fact that he was a visitor in someone
else's classroom, and felt it was important to honor the
established norms and procedures of his cooperating teachers, especially
given that his pupils would seek consistency. Moreover, Alfred viewed
sticking to the mandated curricula and pacing plan as an opportunity to
learn about the "reality" in schools so he could help his
students succeed within it. Even as Alfred tried out and succeeded with
what he called an "adequate" or "no frills"
provisional self, he always maintained a strong identification with his
program's social justice stance. He viewed student teaching and the
first couple of years of teaching as "probationary" where
"I will do what they tell me, and just that." Afterwards,
Alfred said he plans to "whip out the social justice agenda"
(Interview, Oceanside, 11/2006). With more experience and job security,
Alfred plans to institute more of the principles and practices promoted
by his program, but in a way that works within the system: "There
is a different take on reality [in this program], and a different
reality in the [local] schools. We can't go in there to change the
world. We are a cog in the system, but can effect change as a cog. We
need to keep an open mind to these realities in schools"
(Fieldnotes, Oceanside, 11/2006).

In order to negotiate these tensions in student teaching, Alfred
mostly played by the rules while experimenting in the margins. During
our observations, for example, he incorporated some program-endorsed
strategies, including a math activity influenced by socio-cultural
approaches he learned in math methods, and a science lesson influenced
by inquiry approaches from science methods. In both cases, he had doubts
that he had successfully enacted the practices that he and his program
envisioned. Furthermore, as his cooperating teachers did not themselves
utilize or specialize in many of these alternative approaches, Alfred
was left to experiment primarily on his own. In both instances that we
observed, Alfred received little to no feedback or guidance on his
efforts to try out these more alternative approaches. Towards the end of
his student teaching, we asked Alfred what he felt most prepared for as
he entered full-time professional work. Alfred returned again to the
theme that seemed to frame his entire first year of professional
preparation:

I feel very prepared in making, in teaching the curriculum and not
necessarily making it my own yet but that's something that I want to
do later on. But definitely, if I just came in and I grabbed the
[mandated textbook] teacher's manual ... I feel fairly confident
that I could follow what I see in the book and have no problem
whatsoever. But, you know, it's with time that I want to move away
from there and just put into play everything that I've been seeing
the past year. So I guess as a standard teacher, you know, uh ...
(pause) no frills, just go in and do what I have to do. Yeah, I
think I'm there now but to really fully become the social justice
educator that they were preparing us to be, that's going to come
with some time. (Interview, Oceanside, 4/2007)

In negotiating these conflicting possible selves, Alfred spent most
of his student teaching experience enacting the teacher expected of him
in his placement schools rather than the teacher expected by his
program. He had practiced, succeeded, and become confident in a
provisional self as a "no frills" or "adequate"
teacher who can deliver the mandated curricula and follow the rules in
schools. While he understood the limitations of this professional
identity, and still hoped to enact his program-endorsed social justice
identity down the road, this remained a possible rather than a
provisional self as he entered his first year of full-time teaching.

The critical importance of finding opportunities to enact the
possible selves developed at the university was illustrated by the
experiences of Johnny. Johnny had two very different student teaching
placements. From very early in his program, Johnny viewed his emerging
professional identity in terms of relationship building. He believed if
students did not relate to him as teacher then they would not relate to
the material. Being able to relate to students establishes
"credibility in what [teachers] are teaching and preaching"
(Focus Group, Oceanside, 10/2006). This, he argued, requires taking the
time to get to know all students personally.

While his coursework and some early field observation helped him to
develop this possible self, his first student teaching placement
challenged this emerging professional identity. He was placed in a
classroom where he felt his cooperating teacher did not always treat his
students with respect and often had contentious relationships with them.
Johnny found it difficult to build caring relationships in this
environment, as students seemed to resist his efforts. In fact, he found
himself becoming more confrontational with students than he liked.

Later, Johnny reflected, "I experienced so much conflict
during those times. It was because I was confronted with this thing that
I didn't want to become and yet I felt myself in that environment,
this toxic environment, becoming that person" (Interview,
Oceanside, 5/2007). The powerful context of student teaching had Johnny
enacting and, in the process, becoming an explicitly feared self.
Because of these initially painful student teaching experiences, Johnny
had begun to doubt the viability of the teacher he, and his program,
hoped he could become--one that builds mutually respectful and caring
relationships with students.

Johnny was next placed with a cooperating teacher who specialized
in building classroom community. By being able to observe and then
experiment with building positive professional relationships--in ways
endorsed by his program--Johnny had more success in enacting his desired
self. As a result, he came to identify more strongly with and to embody this desired self:

I think in my approach to classroom management that I am getting
closer to that ideal. In the relationships that I'm creating with my
students, and that I continue to create on a day-by-day basis, is
bringing me closer to that ideal--where there really is that mutual
respect. Where they really understand where I am coming from to the
point where we can really dig into learning and being excited about
that. (Interview, Oceanside, 5/2007)

Looking back on the first year of his program, Johnny highlighted
the importance of these opportunities to try out desired and feared
selves in developing his professional identity:

I think there are times when I have had to reconsider what it means
to be an authority figure in the classrooms. Yeah, you can't come in
and be their best friend. At the same time you can't come in and be
a tyrant. But students need to know that there are those boundaries
and limitations. Which I'd known before, but it's the same thing as
watching something done on videotape or reading it in a book versus
actually seeing it modeled for you and doing it yourself. So, before
having gone through the experiences, I'd only heard about it or seen
it on TV. I hadn't experienced it myself. (Interview, Oceanside,
5/2007)

Johnny's case illustrated the importance of opportunities,
particularly successful ones, to experiment with desired possible selves
in the context of professional education. While ultimately his first
placement helped him better understand the kind of teacher he wanted to
be, by experiencing his feared self, without the subsequent opportunity
to experiment with a desired self, he may have concluded that this
professional identity was not possible; Johnny may have opted to leave
the profession, rather than risk evolving into the "tyrant" he
feared becoming.

Implications

Students encounter multiple possible selves in their professional
preparation, many of which they experience as contradictory. From
professors, field supervisors, practitioners, and other experiences,
they begin to construct a repertoire of possible selves--both feared and
desired--that might contribute to their professional identities.
Coursework provides some opportunities to grapple with and experiment
with these possible selves, in part through opportunities to try on the
professional role in approximations of practice. The best example of
this was in the role plays we observed in clinical psychology, where
novices had regular and sustained opportunities to experiment with the
role of therapist and to receive feedback on their efforts. However,
much of this experimentation necessarily occurs in the more authentic
settings of the field placements. Unfortunately, real constraints in
congregations, schools, or clinics make enacting some possible selves
more difficult than others and may even cause novices to enact versions
of their feared selves. As a result of these contradictions and
tensions, novice professionals must try to reconcile who they want to
become with who they are expected to become in particular settings. We
argue that professional education could play a more central role in
helping novices navigate these contradictions and tensions in
constructing, experimenting with, and evaluating provisional
professional identities.

As mentioned above, these tensions were greatest in teacher
education, in which the university was explicitly trying to prepare
novices to serve as change agents. Since the programs are preparing
professionals for visions of schooling that are rarely found in most
urban settings, students may develop images of possible selves that are
difficult to enact in their student teaching placements. Given the bleak
realities of many urban schools, encouraging alternative visions of
teaching can be helpful. One teacher education student commented that
encountering more theoretical and "radical" images of what is
possible in teacher education is not necessarily "false
preparation" because, "I think the theoretical approach is
encouraging you to be a motivated and principled teacher." At the
same time, novices did not have many opportunities

to actually enact these alternative visions of professional identity,
limiting the chance that these identities will take root and develop. As
Hargreaves and Jacka (1995) argue, "Initial teacher education may
increasingly be a process of soft seduction into images and practices of
teaching that prepare new teachers neither to adjust to the unchanged
realities of the schools in which they will begin their paid teaching
careers, nor to develop the intellectual understanding and political
skills which would enable them to critique and challenge those
realities" (p. 58).

Novice teachers may indeed experiment with alternative provisional
selves down the road, perhaps--as Alfred anticipated--after they have
their own classrooms, more experience, and job security. However, many
studies suggest that the status quo in schools may overpower such
efforts at experimentation and instead promote accommodation (Britzman,
1990; Hargreaves & Jacka, 1995; Hoy & Woolfolk, 1990; Rust,
1994). Moreover, finding a work context that simply allows
experimentation may not be enough for a possible self to become a part
of professional identity. Our study suggests that successful
experimentation may be necessary, and that this generally requires
modeling, guidance, and feedback from others.

We argue for more intentional structuring of opportunities to
observe, experiment with, and evaluate possible selves during teacher
education that specifically support novices in negotiating the chasm
between the ideal and the real. In trying to help novices adapt to new
roles, teacher education could give novices more opportunities to
observe experienced professionals who embody the alternative images
promoted in university coursework while successfully navigating the
constraints in today's schools, using both real and virtual
classrooms as examples (c.f. Cochran-Smith, 1991; Coleman, 2006,
gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/ collections/
quest/collections/sites/coleman_amelia/). Teacher educators could also
provide more concrete opportunities for students to experiment with what
it might mean to enact the practices advocated by teacher education
under less than optimal conditions. In one math methods course we
observed, for instance, the math educator had students examine the
district pacing plan and look for opportunities to probe for student
thinking within those constraints.

Through approximations of practice, such as the workshop planning
seminar at Grace Seminary, teacher education can create opportunities
that may not otherwise exist in "real" practice settings--ones
for trying on, evaluating, revising, and succeeding with alternative
provisional selves. George Hillocks's workshop approach to
preparing English teachers (Hillocks, 1995), in which he and his
students essentially took over an urban classroom for a month to co-plan
and co-teach writing, represents an excellent example of an
approximation that allows students to experiment with provisional selves
advocated by the program while getting immediate feedback in an
authentic school setting. Such approximations of practice can also be
designed to provide immediate feedback from experienced professionals
and to encourage and even require some forms of experimentation that
novices may otherwise neglect, as was the case with role playing confrontational therapists in clinical psychology.

Finally, as the cases of Alfred and Johnny suggest, teacher
educators could better utilize fieldwork as a context to experiment with
and evaluate program-endorsed provisional selves in ways that
successfully adapt to real constraints in schools. Developing
assignments that require novices to try out certain practices in the
field and then bring the results of these experiments back to the
universities can provides novices with a strong and continuous support
system for trying on and refining provisional selves. Teacher education
could continue to develop its efforts to require students to videotape,
or otherwise document their experimentation in ways that allow ongoing
feedback from instructors, supervisors, and peers who can encourage and
tune future experimentation so that it may lead to success. This is
particularly important because we suspect that early successes in
enacting provisional selves provide the conditions under which
professional identity can take hold and flourish. By intentionally
supporting novice teachers in trying out and evaluating their emerging
identities in both coursework and fieldwork, professional education can
provide early opportunities to craft identities based on the images of
the teacher they want to become, in ways that can function given the
realities of urban schools.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for its generous
support of this research, both through a Major Grant and through the
Research Training Grant program. We would also like to thank our
colleagues, Christa Compton, Danielle Igra, Emily Shahan, and Peter
Williamson for their contributions to this on-going research project, as
well as Tesha Sengupta Irving, Sarah Freedman, and Deborah Appleman for
their insightful comments on this manuscript. The second author would
also like to thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences for providing the time and space for this work. Finally, we
would like to thank the faculty, staff and students of the programs we
visited for their generosity in allowing us into their classrooms. We
have learned from all of you, and our own practice as teacher educators
has been enriched enormously by our interactions.

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